Heavy overnight and early morning winds Sunday cancelled ferry sailings and left about 65,000 B.C. Hydro customers without power.
And up-Island so much snow was dumped on Mount Wasington the ski resort had to be shut down.
“Sailings on all the major routes were cancelled Sunday morning due to high winds,” said Deborah Marshall, B.C. Ferries spokesperson.
“The good news is that the weather is starting to come down and we are starting to resume our service,” Marshall said, just before 11:30 a.m. Sunday.
“Tsawwassen-Swartz Bay should be going shortly. So things are going to start to move.”
B.C. Ferries cancelled morning sailings between Vancouver Island (from both Nanaimo and Swartz Bay) and the mainland and to the Gulf Islands. When ferry service resumed there were significant delays. Late Sunday afternoon, for example, there were one- and two-sailing waits on the Swartz Bay-Tsawwassen route.
Marshall said tugs had to be brought to Ogden Point after lines securing Northern Sea Wolf broke free at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday. The vessel is undergoing refit for use on B.C. Ferries’ Port Hardy-Bella Coola route.
“She’s undergoing a major upgrade right now. Esquimalt Drydock is the company that’s doing that refit. There were a couple of lines snapped, so they required a couple of tugs to push her back in,” Marshall said. “My understand is there was no damage other than the couple of lines that snapped.”
Environment Canada issued a wind warning Saturday evening calling for gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour. The warning remained in effect Sunday morning.
About 13,000 B.C. Hydro customers on southern Vancouver Island lost power Sunday morning. Hard hit by power outages were the Saanich Peninsula, Gulf Islands, and areas of the West Shore and Oak Bay.
By 3 p.m., there were still more than 7,500 B.C. Hydro customers without power. B.C. Hydro said due to extensive wind damage, some customers may face lengthy outages.
Oak Bay police advised residents to stay away from the waterfront near the Oak Bay marina as heavy winds saw a sailboat break loose from its mooring and crash against the shore.
Up-Island, Mount Washington Alpine Resort was forced to close Sunday due to heavy snowfall and high avalanche danger. About three dozen people, including a troop of scouts were stranded overnight and looking for available floor space at the lodge as the resort was hit with about 110 centimetres of snow in a 24-hour period, said spokesperson Sheila Rivers.
Sunday skiers and boarders spent the day digging their cars out from under mountains of snow instead of skiing.
The snow caused several accidents and forced closure of the road up the mountain. Some motorists who abandoned their cars had to be rescued and transported back up to the resort where they flopped everywhere overnight.
“A lot of folks ended up crashing in the lodge. We had a group of about 20 boy scouts bunk down in a lower level of the lodge. We had people sleeping in our pub in tents in front of the fire,” Rivers said. “It was certainly an interesting night. We haven’t seen this level of snow probably since 2010.”
Traffic started moving slowly down the mountain road shortly after noon Sunday but it was closed again later in the day for snow clearing and was not expected to reopen until early Monday.
The hope Sunday was to reopen the resort some time Monday, Rivers said.
Meanwhile, in the past week, a king tide combined with hurricane-force winds to create a “perfect storm” that caused serious damage to the breakwater at the new Port Renfrew Marina, Capital Regional District director Mike Hicks said.
“Hurricane force winds created reportedly 31 foot swells off the west coast of Vancouver Island at the La Perouse Bank Buoy,” Hicks said. “It didn’t do any damage in the town, except at the marina it took out the majority of one side of the breakwater around the marina.”
Hicks said the owners plan to rebuild.
